David Lynch - Classic or Dud

That thing about "selling out" as he made the film is painful, I get why it must still burn in his stomach.

I'm sure it was painful, but also Dune (and Dino) let him make Blue Velvet, which is what let him make Twin Peaks and pretty much everything he's done since. Fair trade.

thru the alley, behind the marketplace

I was watching Elephant Man again today, and thinking about his career. It's really pretty nuts.

1. He's in art school and makes a sculpture that incorporates film (Six Men Getting Sick)because he wants a painting that moves.

2. Somebody sees it and likes it and commissions him to make another similar piece, or an installation in their house or something. With the downpayment he buys a decent camera but he doesn't know how to work it and the commissioned film is all overexposed and messed up. *FAILURE* The buyer is cool and says hey, whatever, just make something and give me a print. So he makes The Alphabet.

3. The Alphabet gets him a grant from the AFI to make The Grandmother.

4. Based on the strength of the Grandmother, the AFI lets him in to their new program and he packs up the family and moves to California. He's frustrated because he can't get his Gardenback project off the ground, and he's going to quit and they say "hey, don't leave, what do you want to do." "Eraserhead."

5. Him and his buddies work on Eraserhead for five years. I think he gets divorced while this is going on, he's living in the Eraserhead set and delivering newspapers for money. But it gets made! It gets some sort of distribution and becomes a midnight movie hit!

6. Lynch is working with a producer who is buddies with Mel Brooks. He randomly decides he wants to make The Elephant Man, but Mel Brooks controls the rights. Mel loves Eraserhead, so it's in the bag. Lynch is going to make a real studio film.

7. This is where it gets really interesting to me. Lynch has no idea what he's doing. With Eraserhead he had no money but a whole lot of time. Him and his friends figured things out as they went along and rehearsed things meticulously down to how particular syllables are said. With Elephant Man, there's lots of money but a strict schedule. Lynch blows weeks of time because he thinks he is responsible for the special effects. He's dicking around with plaster and trying to make the Elephant Man prosthetics and it's all fucking up and he's not prepared to go to England and work with Real Actors. The real actors don't know what to make of him and he can tell. Some of them are extremely skeptical. It must feel awful, like being a substitute teacher for the first time and the kids all know that you have no clue what is going on. And yet, it works! It's nominated for an a bunch of Oscars!

8. And still things ramp up. At this point he can do whatever he wants. He's offered Return of the Jedi but turns it down and winds up making a pseudo Star Wars movie, Dune. The scale is immense. He's farther away from things, there are multiple crews so he's not always supervising all of the shots. A lot of those amazing sets were actually finely crafted out of wood, the amount of labor involved was bonkers. And I don't think it was ever going to work. If he had total creative control, final cut and everything, I don't think his Dune was going to be a great movie. Elephant Man worked because it was small; there's not really a lot of plot. Plot isn't really what Lynch is about at all and Dune (the book) is all plot. And I doubt he was ever that interested in making a proper Dune. Either he was using it as a vehicle to get his own wack ideas onto the screen (a la Jodorowsky) or he was swept up in his accidental film career and lost sight of his strengths. But it was a shit show. The studio made Dune coloring books for kids, action figures, this was going to be the next big thing except it definitely was not. A lot of people bet a lot of money on Lynch and lost. He must have felt that the industry finally figured out that he did not know what he was doing.

But then he makes Blue Velvet and everything is cool. I can't imagine what all of the above must have felt like.

But imagine if Dune had been a success and he went on to create many bizarre big budget sci-fi films. That would have been cool too!

I have about a week to watch his version of Dune before it leaves Criterion. I remember liking it when I finally saw it years ago despite its rep as a failure. Who knows what I will think now.

I saw ‘Dune’ when I was 11 or 12 and thought it was perfect. I hadn’t read the book beforehand and it made sense to me. Even watching it today, I don’t really agree with much of the criticism back then or Lynch’s attitude towards it. I appreciate it even more now thinking about how unique a production it was. I really like the new version, but I love Lynch’s.

I like it for what it is. It’s like a dream and I’m happy it’s out there. But it feels like a very compromised movie. It’s not Lynchy enough because it’s tied to Herbert and Lynch can’t make the Herbert stuff work. But there are so many amazing visuals that i’m happy to watch it anytime.

Cow_Art, thanks for the rundown; I had no idea Eraserhead took five years!
Also, didn't know about the Mel Brooks connection... I like him even more now...

It’s really something to contemplate if he had directed Return of the Jedi.

Michael J. Anderson as The Yoda from Another Place

Yeah, Jack Nance kept that haircut for five years! Although I doubt he kept it that vertical all the time. There’s one shot where it shows Henry opening a door, there’s a cut and then he’s coming out the door on the other side, or something like that. Over a year passed between the two shots.

Towards the end they ran out of money and Lynch was very dispirited, he was thinking about finishing it with stop motion animation.

There are a couple of deleted scenes that have never shown up. I can’t remember if they are lost or if Lynch doesn’t want to share.

Jedi certainly would have been interesting. On one hand, it would have been even more pressure than Dune. But Lucas would have been there to hold his hand. It may have turned out like Spielberg/Hooper on Poltergeist. I think they also offered it to Cronenberg who was not interested.

When I finally watched Dune in two sittings, after the first hour I thought it was actually pretty entertaining and didn't see why it was so hated. Then I watched the second hour and thought, "ah."

So

many

voice-overs

Lynch has a funny thing with dialog. His people often do not talk like real people and this normally works. I don't think it works as well when they're talking about space gobbledygook. Lynchisms work best when they are grounded in the real world in some way. Which is one reason why I have little patience for his later, experimental short films, like Ant Head. I do like Rabbits though.

I've fallen down a Dune Ebay rabbit hole. I kinda want a Sandworm but that is some expensive plastic.

It's fine. Hitchcock's characters don't talk like real people, much less other movie characters.

Last night, after the above discussion, I signed up for a Criterion Channel trial and watched the first 20-25 minutes or so of Dune… don’t think I can do anymore, y’all, but a scene with Kyle M., Sir Patrick Stewart, and Dean Stockwell was something I did not expect!

Watched Dune for the first time last year. Best part of it for me was watching Kyle McLachlan and Everett McGill together in a completely different universe years before Twin Peaks.

Yeah, I watched it a couple of weeks ago, first time in 39+ years, and was like "Big Ed is Stilgar?!"

Is Jack Nance in there somewhere? I think he's one of the spice miners or something.

For further watching, there's a good documentary about Nance called You Don't Know Jack.

he's the Baron's assistant

iakin nefud call him by his name

I thought he was Paul

plus Jürgen Prochnow is in Fire Walk With Me (admittedly for like 30 seconds and with no dialogue...)

5. Him and his buddies work on Eraserhead for five years. I think he gets divorced while this is going on, he's living in the Eraserhead set and delivering newspapers for money. But it gets made! It gets some sort of distribution and becomes a midnight movie hit!

Another point of serendipity left out of Cow_Art's (awesome!) narrative is that that Lynch had somehow hooked up with this producer Jack Fisk, whose wife is Sissy Spacek (I'm sure someone here knows more of the story), and their money helped keep the project afloat. Spacek is thanked in the end credits; I remember that from all the times I watched it in high school.

Anyway, I just made the connection that Spacek ended up delivering a (remarkable) performance in The Straight Story, decades later...

My question that i’m never going to research and answer is if altman and lynch ever crossed paths while lynch was either making eraserhead or at AFI. The timeline of eraserhead and 3 women intersect and 3 women is just so, so lynchian ime, - kind of unlike anything else altman did. The sissy spacek connection makes it even more curious to me

I think he's one of the spice miners or something.

ha i think you're thinking of... lynch

xps also Alicia Witt is a TP/Dune crossover (Gersten Hayward / Alia)

Lynch was in the first classes of their kind at the AFI, and I think it was more like a residency program than formal classes. There were some abandoned stables that they allowed him to take over and the majority of his time at AFI was spent there. They had to shoot late at night so outside sounds wouldn’t interrupt; when birds started making noise in the morning it was quitting time and he would go to sleep in Henry’s bed and padlock the door so nobody would wander in and find him living there. I can’t remember an Altman/Lynch connection

Jack Fisk and Lynch were high school friends, Jack probably knows Lynch better than anybody. They went to art school together and after graduating they planned a long European trip. They got there, hated it, and immediately returned. Lynch married Jack’s sister. Jack was the man in the planet in Eraserhead and I think after that their careers separated until the Straight Story. Fisk started in set design and then moved onto directing and producing.

The making of Eraserhead is fascinating. They lived in that world for a long time. Catherine Coulson, the Log Lady, was there constantly, feeding them and being a den mother. Lynch insisted on paying them regularly, although it wasn’t much and they would have done it for free because it was the center of their lives at a certain point. When the money ran out he wrote out a contract and gave them a percentage of the profits. Nobody thought there would be profits.

...I would love to hear david lynch and mel brooks talking movies...

The origin of 3 Women is also Lynchian. Altman says he dreamed the title, choice of lead actresses, and opening image exactly as they appear and wrote the movie around them.

brooks really threw his weight around for lynch back when lynch had none of his own:

When Paramount Pictures studio executives were shown a cut of this movie, they wanted the opening and closing surrealist sequences to be cut. Executive producer Mel Brooks, according to producer Stuart Cornfeld, said to them: "We are involved in a business venture. We screened the film for you, to bring you up to date as to the status of that venture. Do not misconstrue this as our soliciting the input of raging primitives."

Brooks was really as saintly a producer as you could have; he even kept his name off the credits and publicity so no one would get the wrong idea about the tone of the movie.

I just found a sweet video of Lynch talking about Altman. They got to know each other after they were both nominated for Best Director in 2002 (Straight Story/Gosford Park). It doesn't seem like there was any direct connection early in on in their careers.

Post it!

I found this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjqEKfJvaJo

That's it! I don't know how to post pictures or video.

It took me a couple of years to figure out there was something beyond I Love Music.

I’ll have to revisit 3 Women… I saw it a long time ago, I remember being fairly ambivalent about it (despite the esteem in which I hold both actresses). The movie comes up a lot.

Trying to make good use of my Criterion trial, I watched a little of this movie today... it was so bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_Lover_(1993_film)

(This is very tangentially Lynch-related – as it starred Mädchen Amick, and the casting director was Johanna Ray. Also, it was sort of like a Lynch movie as made by someone who has heard Lynch movies described once or twice, but had never actually seen one, or any movie at all.)

That Coulson was AC on eraserhead AND killing of a chinese bookie is one of my favorite bits of film trivia

"it's better that way, david" - what a sweet story

pic.twitter.com/MIajUppbpA

— [ominous whoosh] (@ominouswhoosh) April 26, 2023

David Lynch is filming something in West Hollywood

Seems based on a random tweet by someone having lunch – pretty thin stuff – but I guess these are the scraps we have to grasp onto...

yeah i'll take this right now, just pop it on the 'reasons to live' pile.

I watched Lost Highway again, and kind of loved it this time. There’s something about it that’s just highly… enjoyable to watch. Maybe especially if you’ve seen it once or twice already, and aren’t hung up on trying to “figure it out.”

My local Landmark theater is doing a David Lynch month. I missed Blue Velvet, but caught Mulholland Drive last night. Next week is Wild At Heart, which I've never seen, then Lost Highway the following week. I've never seen Wild At Heart before, so looking forward to that.

Wild at Heart has a middling rep but it’s pretty good. The tangents and side stories are what really make it work for me.

Lynch has this stylistic shift in the late '90s that almost makes him seem like a different artist... Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr just have this "look & feel" that's so distinctive (and of course there's The Straight Story in between those, which is remarkable in its own way). It feels weird to say that this is where he really "takes off," obv the earlier stuff is great too, but there's something about his new sensibility that's even better (IMO), and the re-watchability is particularly high on the films in that period.

i rewatched Lost Highway again recently too after not seeing it for a good 20 years and quite liked it still. I don't try to 'solve' lynch movies. The only one I haven't had the urge to revisit is Inland Empire, which I didn't watch in one sitting the first time and have never seen in a theater. Probably would if someone would show it around here.

Inland Empire is the one that benefits the most from seeing in a theater